This is an art blog based in Europe, primarily Switzerland, but with much about the US and elsewhere. With the changes in blogging and social media, it is now a more public storage for articles connected to discussions occurring primarily on facebook and the like.
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Panorama view of exhibition in Jedlitschka Gallery, Zurich.

24 May 2015

Paul Germanos on his blog "Chicago Artworld" did an interview with me, as he has with a group of Chicago-artists-who-left-Chicago. Here it is! Link

May 22, 2015

2015: Mark Staff Brandl on Leaving Chicago

Paul Germanos: Hold old are you? Where are you from? When did you come here? Is Chicago one of many stops on your journey?

Mark Staff Brandl: I just turned 60! I am an artist of the venticento, was born, mid novecento, in 1955 in Peoria and went to high school in Pekin, Illinois.
I visited Chicago a lot as a child and after my initial studies moved
there in 1980. I immediately fell in love with the city; Chicago is my
hometown in my heart till this day. I left in 1988. Since then I have
lived with my Swiss wife Cornelia in several places around the world
including Tortola in the Caribbean and have lived primarily in Switzerland.

As a critic, I've been a contributor to London’s The Art Book, Sharkforum on-line, a podcaster for Bad at Sports,
a Theory Editor for Chicago's Proximity magazine and a Contributing
Editor for New York’s Art in America. I am also the curator of The the
Kunstgrill and the Collapsible Kunsthalle.

Works of mine have
been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Victoria and
Albert Museum in London, The Whitney Museum in New York, the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Chicago, the St. Gallen Art Museum, The Thurgau
Museum of Fine Art, The E.T.H. Graphic Collection in Zurich, The Museum
of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the International Museum of Cartoon
Art, the Art Museum Olten and others.

PG:
For what did you hope when you came to Chicago? A degree? A job? What
did you think that you'd find here? What was your first impression of
the city?MSB:
I began to have many possibilities to exhibit my work around 1980, so I
left graduate school and moved to Chicago. I went to Chicago for the
artworld. I also quickly got a job building exhibitions, dioramas and
the like at the Field Museum of Natural History.
Among other things there I was deeply involved in or built with my
co-worker friends are the Eskimo house and the Egyptian hall, especially
the Mastaba.

At first the artworld was great, with N.A.M.E. Gallery, ARC/Raw Space, Artemisia, Randolph Street Gallery
and on and on. Many Kunsthalle-like places to show experimental work.
There was a real feeling of breakthrough in the air, the very beginnings
of Postmodernism, with amazing artists like Raoul Deal, Wesley Kimler,
Michael Paha, Tony Fitzpatrick, Gary Justis, Jeff Hoke and me getting lots of attention. That changed later and is one of the reasons I left.

PG:
Did you attend a school here? Which school did you attend? How long
were you in school here? Did you receive a degree here? When did you
receive your degree?

MSB: I studied art, painting, art
history, philosophy, literature and literary theory at the University of
Illinois in Champaign-Urbana (BFA), Illinois State University in
Bloomington (MA), Columbia Pac. University in California (MA), and
received my Ph.D. in Art History and Metaphor Theory magna cum laude
from the University of Zurich in Switzerland. (Diss here.) So, no, I did not directly
study in Chicago. But I learned so much from Chicago's music, the
museums, the artists. Like Phil Berkman and Edith Altmann.

PG:
How long were you in practice here? Did you enjoy success on your own
terms? Can you recall some peak experience? If you felt frustrated, what
frustrated you? Poor sales? Lack of publicity? High rent? Crime?
Inefficient transportation? Public apathy? Bad weather? What was the
total amount of time that you spent as a resident?

MSB: My
career as an artist began in Chicago. I must be a Chicago artist in my
soul, for as Tony Fitzpatrick's daughter Gabrielle mentioned when we got
together in Florence, Italy recently, I still have a Chicago accent in
English. I got lots of media attention for my art, sold well, won some
awards, was listed as best installation of the year (or something like
that) in The New Art Examiner once for a Raw Space piece. And so on. It
was going upward, but as you know art careers have ups and downs. I
found Chicago's music, literature and comic art world's wonderful. I
believe Chicago is a wonderful place to live; my wife loved it too in
the year she lived there, and misses it: those amazing neighborhoods,
the food, the various ethnic groups. Art too. The Artists. But not it's
artworld.

PG: How does Chicago know you? Does Chicago know you? Have you been misunderstood?

MSB:
I suspect that my rather wild lifestyle was more notorious than my art
at the end of my "welcome" in Chicago ( I have since settled a bit.) I
think as an artist, especially pre Neo-Academicist-Conceptualist Chicago
days, I was and am known as a somewhat too abrasive, rebellious
intellectual. Someone who is insufficiently sophistically behaved. A
highly critical conceptual painter, a mongrel addicted to art, personal
freedom, philosophy, painting and several vernacular arts, including
comics and sign-painting.

PG:
Was there an event which precipitated your departure? For which other
city did you leave? What was waiting for you in that other city?

MSB:
I left at the end of the 80s, when it appeared that there was nothing
more for me in Chicago's visual artworld. In one of my recurring,
sporadic changes, I had abandoned my earlier Late Conceptual Art and
began pursuing the painting-installation-vernacular-art mongrelization
that I still engage in. (Although all my "directions" have dealt with
the same core content and subject matter.)

As I decided to
abandon the Windy City, a brand of art was beginning to be enforced ---
an exceedingly trendy, art magazine-derivative Neo-Conceptualism (then
still linked to Neo-Geo). The SAIC Kirshner-Klan
as we called it then. That, together with all the other aspects of
Chicago's recurring provincialism, and a dreadful, dissolving love
relationship, made me think, "Why the hell, then, don't you just go
directly to that worshiped Mecca --- i.e. NYC?" I could see that Chicago
was once again strangling its own creativity and would fade, as it
indeed did, from Second City to Third, as LA was up-and-coming ---
believing in itself!

I started on my way, yet then met my future
wife (in the kitchen of my studio, strangely enough, due to a Maxtavern
connection). She is Swiss, and after an unexpected further year in
Chicago, and a later year in Tortola in the Caribbean, we headed off to
Europe. I have now lived in one place or another in Europe for 27 years.
Whenever I live for extended periods in the US, I never seem to make it
out of NYC.

PG:
(a) Does
Chicago look different to you since your arrival to it and/or
departure from it? Do you have advice for someone about to begin what
you've finished? (b) Do you expect to maintain a connection to Chicago and its art world?
What's your incentive to stay connected? Have you left friends or family
here?

MSB: (answering both questions) Said a bit too
roughly, Chicago is a great place to be from. To be FROM. Leave it. But
keep up contacts. There are great, creative people there like Lynne Warren,
Paul Klein, Bad at Sports, and so on. But Chicago is too provincial.
Chances are better elsewhere. Provinciality is best construed as a state
of mind, rather than one of geography. Once upon a time, provinciality
consisted of knowing nothing of the world-at-large, only looking at
local art and culture. Now that has inverted. The new provinciality is a
form of consensus globalism, where you are always looking elsewhere,
copying New York or the Biennale or documenta and never really looking
at the great art occurring around your own corner.

I stay
connected because I know that outside of the boring consensus-correct
art, there are always wonderful artists creating unique, original,
personal work in our city. Think of Chicago's theatre scene, literary
world, and rich music, especially Blues, history. The same is true for
visual art. Or can be.

PG: By what means do you stay abreast of developments in the arts in Chicago? Print? Social media? Visits?

MSB: Internet! Visiting, etc. From Sharkforum to Bad at Sports to emailing and facebook.

PG: In the end, is place important? Is physical location a matter of consequence in 2015?

MSB:
For your day-to-day life, yes. But not really for art. A curator of a
Kunsthalle told me in discussion that I had forgotten that it is the
duty of curators in provincial areas to educate the local artists
through confrontation with influences from outside. This is completely
idiotic. Such "instruction" is totally unnecessary in our globally
networked society. Most of us who live and work outside the few urban
centers for culture immediately know everything that occurs in them.
Normally, I have seen what is happening in New York City directly there,
and Zurich, and Berlin, and London, and Florence and Istanbul, and
more. And then 8 to 10 years later I am "instructed" about it? This
teaching consists mainly in telling us which curatorially correct and
momentarily accepted tendencies we should kow-tow before — something of a
"Top o' the Pops" for the artworld, or even more banal, "Art World Star
Search." As the artist Alex Meszmer opined, behind this lies the
attempt to achieve "a little piece of Documenta, or New York, finally in
every province." This thought process is what destroyed the originality
of much of Chicago's art scene.

PG:
Was some important subject omitted from this query? Please introduce
any additional material which you believe to be relevant.

MSB:
Artists in Chicago: if you do not leave, you can do something even more
important. Start and maintain your own artworld, artvillages. Be
antisophistic; stop being apparatchiks in your own "dissing." Cooperate
with other artists. Ignore the current gatekeepers; they too shall pass.
We will not. Art is a huge, millennium-long discussion among artists.
The others are listening in. We can welcome them, but stop letting them
dominate.

In the whole artworld, but clearly so in Chicago, we
are in an academicist, mannerist situation that both artists and
curators should rethink. Encourage self-reliance and the acceptance of
responsibility on the part of artists, primarily, but also the rest of
the Chicago artworld.

10 May 2015

This is an article I wrote long ago, Spring 1988, for the publication Chicago / Art / Write, for editor L.J. Douglas, (founding editors William Conger, Richard Loving and Frank Piatek). I just rediscovered it and as it has never been online, and I found it still pertinent to my thoughts and to art now, I thought I would upload it.

A photo of me in front of one of my paintings from several painting-installations at that time, 1988.

WHAT REPRESENTATION REPRESENTS

What constitutes representation, or rather what constitutes representation
in a work of art? Discussions of this usually begin with the tale of the
ancient Greek painter able to create a work so convincing that birds would
attempt to eat the depicted grapes, and include a discourse on the original
Greek word mimesis, linking it to imitation. Because our terms for
representation commonly stem from this, we can be led into certain areas of
thought. But none of the available translations are fully accurate, so I shall
bypass this rather than be bogged down by obtuse argument.

There are arts that embrace representation and those that do not. The
intrinsically representational arts are literature (including poetry, prose,
and drama), the visual arts (including painting, sculpture, photography, and
film), and, of course, other arts close to or between these areas, such as
performance, comics mixed media, and intermedia. That favorite metaphor for abstract
painters, music, is an example of an art which resists representation. For
obvious reasons I am not discussing this last category and, owing to personal
predilection, I want to discuss only the visual half of the former.

The representational nature of visual art is one of its most important,
fruitful, and intriguing elements — yet for very particular reasons. It is
amusing that we always speak as if illusion were truly possible in art. An
argument can be made that this deception never genuinely occurs. We never
mistake art for reality. The disinterestedness of the aesthetic attitude, as philosophers
say, disallows this. To aesthetically perceive anything is in fact not to be
"fooled" by pretence. We neither bump our noses trying to walk into
Richard Estes paintings, nor rush about attempting to save the victim of a
Hitchcock movie from harm.

The viewer is not over-distanced, of course: I might get tears at a tragedy,
and frequently an excellent painting sends chills of excitement up my spine.
Response to a work of art is in fact multilayered and complex. Art demands a
synchronous, contrary, almost oscillating attention. I view a work both entranced
and consciously considering the skill of the image or artifice. As an example, trompe
1'oeil, "fool-the-eye" painting, is ironically the opposite of its
supposed intent. Our whole attention is riveted by the accomplishment of the
artifice, which gives us the thrill. It in no way deceives us. If trompe 1'oeil
wished to trick us the only successful pieces would be counterfeit bills. There
is always the danger that simple emotional escapism can preclude moral
involvement and analysis of larger context; Bertolt Brecht shared this concern,
as is evidenced in his attacks on theatrical illusion.

What makes an image a representation of something? How is it a
"picture?" Just because the artist intended — or we presume that
he/she did — a work to be a representation of something, is it? Because the
artist looked at a tree while in the act of painting is that why the .piece
then bears the image of a tree? If I notice that a picture reminds me visually
of a human's face, is it a portrait? These points may be of interest in the process
of the artist, but it is obviously untrue to ascribe to any essence, or
interest, of representation itself. Furthermore, I am not talking about
"figurative" art, genre, or simple naturalism. Representation must go
beyond that; we must consider the inclusion of history, meaning, as well as our
abilities and inabilities to recognize it.

There is a famous scientific anecdote of chimpanzees able to recognize
photos of themselves, yet certain humans who had never previously seen
photographs were unable to do so. Even so-called primitive or traditional
societies have highly sophisticated systems of representation that filter their
vision. The convoluted modern "naive" theory is that if an image
somehow resembles a photograph of a certain object — discounting certain
aspects of photographic vision (such as out-of-focus) — then it is a
representation of that object. This points, through its obvious illogicality,
elsewhere. The point is that representation is largely a matter of social
convention. As symbol shades into "picture" and is culturally
dependent, I can only see representation fully realized and most pregnant with
meaning, as concretized belief. By this I mean ideology, although-I hesitate to
use this-current buzzword, or more accurately Weltanschauung
("world-looking-at," "philosophy-of-life") and Weltbild
("world-picture"). Flippantly, I might say that representation
represents itself. This is not circular like a formal tautology, such as
"what you see is what you get." A picture of the world, or some
.element of it, is a rich evocative arena. A picture is open to critical
interpretation and bears the weight of previous and current assumptions
concerning the uses (and misuses) of similar images. Because of this we only see
through conceptual skrims. Our knowledge of an image is a knowledge of the
conditions inherent in that image. For instance, representation from the past
reveals to a greater or lesser extent the superstructure of the society that
produced it, which is of course related to other elements such as but not
limited to the economic base. It also reflects, whether intentionally or not,
the mores and values of the people and society out of which it arose.

Jan Van Eyck's painting fully depicts both the religiosity of his time and
-the rising antimedieval materialism that was to eclipse it. Oscar Schlemmer's
work proffers his period's hope for a grander future, yet also portrays the
dehumanization it wrought. It is credible to postulate that much of our
understanding of visual art is through its ability to give direct expression to
the sense of shared humanity. But the strongest works are those that sustain
the most complex responses, like life. Therein lies the presence and vigor of
representation: Works of art can be made for interpretation, cognizant of their
status, associations, and cultural situation. Artists have the ability to wield
considerable power through their manipulation of the multiplicity of
references, technical aspects, emotions, and intellectual assertions of
representation to delineate the truth of our experience.

MARK STAFF BRANDL,
artist and art historian, formerly of Chicago, The Field Museum of Natural
History; now living in Switzerland